Critic Quotes

This [Oh, Calcutta!] is the kind of show to give pornography a dirty name.

Everyone lies about sex, more or less, to themselves if not to others, to others if not to themselves, exaggerating its importance or minimizing its pull.

Her cooking is the missionary position of cooking. That is how everybody starts.
Defending Delia Smith

When love first dawns on the mind, the faintest superficial contact flashes along the nerves as a thrill of delicious emotion.

Back o'er the deep I turn my longing eyes,
And chide the wayward passions that rebel:
Yet boots it not to think, or to complain,
Musing sad ditties to the reckless main.
To dreams like these, adieu! the pealing bell
Speaks of the hour that stays not—and the day
To life's sad turmoil calls my heart away.

William Lisle Bowles
William Lisle Bowles
We want to do something and a definition is a means of doing it. If we want certain results then we must use certain meanings or definitions. But no definition has any authority apart from a purpose, or to bar us from other purposes.

Gandhi was everything the voting members of the Academy would like to be: moral, tanned and thin.

Joe Morgenstern
Joe Morgenstern
Whether these characters are lovable or detestable, they're lovable or detestable in a TV way - defined by a minimal set of traits that are endlessly reiterated and incapable of expansion or alteration, a fixed loop.

Science is the great cleanser of the human thinking; it makes impossible any religion but the highest.

Good work, like good talk or any other form of worthwhile human relationship, depends upon being able to assume an extended shared world.

The only remarkable thing about Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather, Part II is the insistent manner in which it recalls how much better his original film was. Even if Part II were a lot more cohesive, revealing and exciting than it is, it probably would have run the risk of appearing to be the self-parody it now seems…Its insights are fairly lame at this point.

I don't know what art is, but I do know what it isn't. And it isn't someone walking around with a salmon over his shoulder, or embroidering the name of everyone they have slept with on the inside of a tent.

Sometimes, the shortest path between two points is serpentine,

Nobody seriously questions the principle that it is the function of mass culture to maintain public morale, and certainly nobody in the mass audience objects to having his morale maintained.

Twinkle, twinkle, little star! How I wonder what you are. Up above the world so high, Like a diamond in the sky...

When a language creates – as it does – a community within the present, it does so only by courtesy of a community between the present and the past.

In holy music's golden speech Remotest notes to notes respond: Each octave is a world; yet each Vibrates to worlds beyond its own.

English literature is a kind of training in social ethics.... English trains you to handle a body of information in a way that is conducive to action.

Avant-garde art has become habitual, a dead letter with little spiritual consequence, however materially refined.

Donald Kuspit
Donald Kuspit
It is one of the great charms of books that they have to end.

His thoughts were a loose skein of threads,
And tangled emotions, vague and dim;
And sacrificing what he loved
He lost the dearest part of him

William Braithwaite
William Braithwaite
Life, if you live it right, keeps surprising you, and the thing that keeps surprising you the most…is yourself

Perhaps the old literacy of words is dying and a new literacy of images is being born. Perhaps the printed page will disappear and even our records be kept in images and sounds.

Inner slavery is even worse than outward slavery; and inner freedom is even better than outward freedom.

Not only has photography so thoroughly saturated our visual environment as to make the invention of visual images seem archaic, but it is also clear that photography is too multiple, too useful to other discourses, ever to be wholly contained within traditional definitions of art.